Profile : The BBC’s Battered Sahib : Mark Tully has been expelled by India, chased by mobs and picketed. He loves his job.

It is a sign of his great renown that while several dozen journalists were beaten and chased by Hindu fanatics storming the mosque in Ayodhya recently, only BBC bureau chief Mark Tully was singled out by name.

“We were surrounded by a huge mob screaming, ‘Death to Mark Tully!’ and ‘Death to BBC!’ ” he recalled with a grin.

After being chased by a howling mob and then trapped in a tiny room for two hours, Tully escaped, disguised in a long shawl--only to be denounced a few days later by the Indian government and police officials for broadcasting the truth about the resulting riots and political crisis.

“You work for BBC, you get shot at from all sides,” Tully said.

Sometimes literally. As probably the best-known and most controversial English-language radio and TV reporter on the Indian subcontinent, Tully has been chased by mobs, expelled by one government and accused of bringing down another. Angry listeners have picketed his home, broken his windows and threatened his life.

His many fans are kinder. He’s been decorated by both the Queen of England and the president of India, narrated successful films and written three popular books. Reviewing his most recent collection of essays on India, “The Defeat of a Congressman,” London’s Daily Mail compared him to Rudyard Kipling, while the Sunday Telegraph simply called him India’s “best-loved Englishman.”

“Everyone in the U.K. associates Mark Tully with India,” said Derrick Brown, a longtime friend who is New Delhi correspondent for the Guardian.

More important, perhaps, Tully’s BBC World Service dispatches--first broadcast in English and then rebroadcast in Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, Nepali and Bengali--are the most reliable source of unfiltered, uncensored news about major events for untold millions in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Radio and TV are critically important in countries with low literacy rates. And now Tully’s reports for BBC television, broadcast on Hong Kong’s Star TV, go by cable or housetop satellite dishes into 1 1/2 million Indian homes as well.

It is why, alone among correspondents, Tully is known universally by the respectful colonial-era term: Tully Sahib. His fame is such that virtually every foreign reporter who goes to India is approached by someone asking hopefully, “BBC? Tully Sahib?” The Far Eastern Economic Review has called him a “cult figure” in the region.

Perhaps it’s only fitting. Tully was born in Calcutta and raised in India when it was still the jewel of the British Empire. His father was a newly arrived English businessman, while his mother’s family had spent generations in what is now Bangladesh. It was “my good luck,” says Tully, that he was stranded as a boy in Darjeeling during World War II rather than sent back to England.

After the war, Tully did go to a traditional British public school. Then came two years in the army, a history degree at Cambridge and an unsuccessful stint at a theological college. There was a mutual parting of ways.

“It was decided I was not suitable for clergy,” he said, puffing away, as usual, on a foul-smelling, hand-rolled South Indian cheroot. Why? “Drinking, mainly.”

After several other unsuitable jobs, Tully found a spot in the personnel department of the BBC. A year later, in 1965, he was on his way back to Delhi as an assistant. By 1972, he was the bureau chief and on his way to becoming as much an institution as the BBC itself in Britain’s former colony.

Fluent in Hindi, Tully covered the bloody Bangladesh war of independence, suspension of civil rights under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (when he was expelled for 18 months) and repeated upheavals in Pakistan. He broadcast the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the Union Carbide calamity at Bhopal and the Indian army attack on the Golden Temple, the holiest of Sikh shrines, and the subsequent assassination of Mrs. Gandhi.

Tully was later accused of bringing down Rajiv Gandhi’s government in 1989. “I stand by that coverage to this day,” he says proudly.

Two years later, he told the world of Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination as well.

But Tully seems surprised when a visitor asks how he enjoys his job. “I think I’m more interested in India than I am in journalism,” he says. Now 57, Tully plans to stay on the subcontinent after he retires in three years.

A ruddy, rumpled man, Tully has unruly long hair and the tall, tweedy look of an Oxford don. Reading glasses ride down his nose as he pounds on an ancient word processor held together with wire and tape. His office is cluttered with books, old British-era woodcuts, and nameplates and tickets from old trains.

“I have a passionate love of railways,” he explained. “And an equally passionate loathing of roadways and air transport.”

Each afternoon, he enjoys a chew of pan, a bitter-tasting concoction of betel nut, lime and leaves that, he says, settles his stomach and helps him think. Sometimes, he says, he agonizes for weeks over whether he got the last story right.

“He lives in terror of getting something wrong,” said Christopher Thomas, a friend who is New Delhi correspondent for the Times of London. “He knows that one wrong sentence can start a riot.”

In fact, it was a militant Hindu leader’s charge to his followers that the BBC was misreporting the situation at Ayodhya that apparently sparked the attacks on journalists Dec. 6. What BBC television had shown was file footage of riots two years earlier.

It wasn’t Tully’s report, and it wasn’t wrong, but that wasn’t the issue. The Hindu radicals apparently wanted to stop news from getting out until they had demolished the mosque and built a temple atop the ruins. They didn’t count on Tully.

Moments after the attack began, Tully drove to a phone five miles away to break the news to the world. Then came his dilemma.

“I felt under great mental pressure to go back in even though it was the height of stupidity,” he said. “After all, people were getting beat up in the name of the BBC. And in my name.”

So he went back, and was again surrounded by a mob screaming, “Death to Tully!” He was shoved in a room for two hours. “They told my friends, three Indian journalists, to go. They said: ‘We have nothing against you. Don’t make trouble.’ They refused to go.”

A friendly Hindu holy man eventually interceded, and Tully walked out as night fell with a shawl over his head. “It was the nastiest thing I’ve seen by a long shot,” he said.

But it wasn’t the end. As religious riots exploded in city after city, eventually killing more than 1,200 people, police, politicians and some members of the press publicly accused the BBC and, to a lesser extent, CNN of making matters worse by beaming uncensored TV news into people’s homes via cable and satellite. In some areas, when the government complained, cable companies jammed the broadcasts.

“Riots follow information,” S. Narendra, government chief spokesman, explained in an interview. “If the news travels that Hindus attacked Muslims, or Muslims attacked Hindus, then the violence spreads. If you show what’s happening elsewhere, then you cause more problems.”

Thus, government-run television, Doordarshan, and All India Radio (AIR) gave few details of the violence. As in previous riots, official statements didn’t say if Hindus, Muslims or anyone else was involved, identifying participants only as “a religious community.” They didn’t say if a Muslim mosque or a Hindu temple was burned, mentioning only “a place of worship.” Most newspapers use similar self-censorship.

As a result, Indians tuned into BBC radio and TV for the truth. It was the first time many saw live television coverage of sensitive events in a country where official policy has been to play down or ignore religious tensions.

Not everyone liked what was broadcast. “The gory images we saw on the BBC may appear attractive to foreign viewers but affect our people, who are less sophisticated, differently,” Justice Bakhtawar Lentin told the Times of India. “Doordarshan gave us the facts without showing provocative visuals. In this highly charged situation such restraint was necessary.”

“The foreign news networks, particularly CNN and the BBC, went out of their way to show the gory visuals of outraged people screaming and shouting,” complained India’s Financial Express.

Not surprisingly, Tully disagrees. “I wouldn’t in any way deny the need for sensitivity on the part of the BBC,” he said. “But they can’t keep modern TV journalism out forever. And part of the shock has been (that) this was the first time people saw it.”

Tully thinks the Ayodhya crisis has been a disaster for India--and he isn’t optimistic about the future of the country he loves.

“This country has a terrible history of going through traumas, and then nothing happens--and everything goes on as if nothing had happened,” he said. “This time, I see the potential for something very serious.”

Biography

Name: Mark Tully

Title: New Delhi Bureau Chief, BBC

Age: 57

Personal: Born in Calcutta, the son of an English businessman. Fluent in Hindi. Holds an Order of the British Empire and also India’s Tadma Shre, a rare distinction for a foreigner.

Quote: “You work for BBC, you get shot at from all sides.”